A vegetable garden in the dead of winter

Vegetable gardening in the dead of winter - Autonomy without heating with 70 fresh, frost-resistant vegetables to grow in pots, terraces or gardens

Growing fresh vegetables in the dead of winter? Sounds like a good joke! And yet... to grow fresh vegetables in winter, it's often necessary to take action in summer, even as early as spring.

Wolfgang Palme, after some twenty years of scientific research at home in Austria (including in the mountains), has realized that the possibilities are infinitely wider than is generally accepted by gardeners, and even by many experts. At the cutting edge of agronomic thinking, he produces with constraints that go beyond the requirements of the organic label, in an approach that respects the environment and "sustainability", which notably excludes any recourse to heating.

In this book, the author summarizes recent and old, but sometimes forgotten, knowledge that enables us to understand how plants adapt to the cold, and how it is possible to support them, to give them a helping hand, with a number of adapted techniques and tools (tunnels, frames, warm layers, sails...).

He goes on to detail over 70 vegetable species that can produce abundantly in the middle of winter. Some are well known: cabbages of all kinds, chicory, endive, radish, turnip, lamb's lettuce, beet, Swiss chard, parsnip... Others are just beginning to be known: Asian lettuces, bok choy, Cuban claytone, radicchio, mizuna... And a few are waiting to be discovered: maceron, plantain corne-decerf, chopped garlic, nutsedge...

An indispensable tool for producing more off-season vegetables, taking a big step towards self-sufficiency and adding diversity to our winter dishes.

Wolfgang Palme - Tana Editions - 392 pages